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Comment by mmsc | Hacker News Reader

Dubs and I upvote.

>Like all recovered edgelords who came of age in the early 2010s, I somewhat miss the heyday of image-boards like 4chan. They were the final bastion of the wild-west early internet before the nazis ruined everything.

Extremely true. I don't know anywhere like those times these days. Where do the young people/trolls hang out and push to the edge of acceptance these days? Or is the culture of "getting right to the edge of getting banned but not crossing the line for lulz" and "act in a way nobody knows whether you're actually trolling or not" dead?

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I want to argue that there are some rose-tinted glasses at play. /b/ (which is what most people think of when they think about 4chan) has been considered "no longer good" since at least 2006 [1], probably earlier. And even by that time they were already organizing raids and causing real harm to communities, both online and offline.

I'm not sure that it's 4chan the one who has changed but rather that the world got a lot more connected [2]. A 2010 edgelord may say "pool's closed" while a 2025 edgelord may say "it was a Roman salute", but the spirit behind is probably the same.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:4chan/Archive_4#Death_of_...

[2] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/number-of-internet-users

All of this 100%. And on a more personal level, while I had a grand old time as a 3edgy5me t(w)eenage boy on the early, "free" internet, that time has left me with numerous mental scars I carry with me every day.

- Thanks to shock sites, for showing me things a 13 year old kid really should not be seeing, and I wish I meant something as banal as pornography. I'm still occasionally haunted by images I've seen to such a degree where I have to take short breaks at work to compose myself.

- Thanks to political discussion boards, which turned important, real life issues and global problems that have genuine life or death stakes for people who weren't me into an alternative to sports that also let me pretend I was in any way intellectually superior to my peers for simply being willing and able to regurgitate conservative political propaganda that I barely comprehended.

- Thanks to the entire thing, for helping me nurture a shut-in mentality, that other people were too much work to be worth it, that my peers were dumb and not worth my time, that they wouldn't understand me at all and so involving myself in school was completely pointless, ensuring I would have no social life or skills whatsoever when I graduated high school and later college. Instead you gave me an entire other world of similarly uninformed, loud assholes to live in that would completely dissolve by the year 2009, leaving me 20 years old with no idea who the fuck I was, or what I believed in, ripe for recruitment into reactionary politics that would make me an insufferable douchebag for the next 10 years or so until I managed to pull my head out of my ass.

So well put. This should be posted every time someone is nostalgic of those times.

I'm not pro-walled garden, all is dandy and barbie but there is an opposite extreme.

For me the most fun time as a teenager was role-playing on forums: free, fun and harmless.

> I'm still occasionally haunted by images I've seen to such a degree where I have to take short breaks at work to compose myself.

This is PTSD. Get checked out.

You know the meme. /b/ was never good.

As the other poster pointed out, /b/ was never good;).

But:

>A 2010 edgelord may say "pool's closed" while a 2025 edgelord may say "it was a Roman salute", but the spirit behind is probably the same.

I think I disagree. I don't think "pool's closed" was ever boosted into the mainstream, nor was it legitimized across truly fascist or racist communities; it was an internet meme for internet people. "It was a roman salute" is a phrase of normies that likely have limited experience with computers and online communities; without getting into the politics, a certain class of people actually believe "it was a roman salute". "pool's closed" meant nothing outside of specific communities.

This is a fair point.

I know that "pool's closed" comes from Habbo Hotel, but only because I've actually heard that information before. I wouldn't know anything about it otherwise.

In contrast, I've never heard of the "it was a Roman salute" meme before, but It's pretty easy for me to understand that this is (probably) talking about people defending Elon Musk's actions - and I'm not even American.

“Any community that gets its laughs by pretending to be idiots will eventually be flooded by actual idiots who mistakenly believe that they're in good company.“ (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1012082)

Having been an early user of 4chan back in late 2003, from what I saw, the tone shift of nazi stuff just being edgy belligerence for the shock value to people saying “no really, this is my serious political ideology” really got traction somewhere around 2012-2014. Prior to that, there was still pushback. Much like how the idea of having a “waifu” was originally a derisive joke, but somehow turned into actual practice.

This coincided with a few things, massive increase in internet use, raids having increased 4chans notoriety, but most importantly it was the timeframe when Russia prepared for and invaded invaded crimea, which included ramping up “active measures” to shift conversation with troll farms/propaganda. 4chan (and later, 8chan, which had a huge population of boomers buying into “qanon” nonsense) became an ideal host to try to amplify disruptive propaganda.

I didn’t quite notice what was going on, since by that time I was mostly only on select boards like /tg/ or alt chans like operatorchan, but the Russian influence became obvious in the lead up to the 2016 election.

And it wasn’t just nazi stuff, it was all sorts of bullshit like Marxism, esoteric magic and conspiracy shit that was being thrown around to see what stuck. And they were active across every social media site. Though as bad as 4chan was, I’d argue russian presence on Facebook and twitter was especially harmful and far reaching. They didn’t even need to be subtle or target groups: https://qz.com/1284222/russian-facebook-ads-were-barely-targ...

Trump being a meme is what got him off the ground. And here we are.

>around 2012

"the post that killed /new/" comes to mind

I think a part of what happened has to do with >"act in a way nobody knows whether you're actually trolling or not"

Some people were joking and some weren't, or were just too dim to understand that it was a joke, and then when they all showed up in Charlottesville to march. They were mostly serious except for that one poor guy who still thought it was a meme and ran away.

There was even an old 4chan joke for this:

"Any community that gets its laughs by pretending to be idiots will eventually be flooded by actual idiots who mistakenly believe that they're in good company." -Rene Descartes

The amusing thing being that the original source of this is hn, not 4chan [1]. deserves a spot on https://news.ycombinator.com/highlights imo.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1012082

My god, DarkShikari... I haven't heard that name in a decade.

Community size and reach plays a big part in this.

Aside from the the whole "Am I trolling as a racist or am I a racist trolling?" issue, communities get away with a lot more when they are smaller, more insular and more hidden from the public. Once the community starts to bleed out beyond the immediate site, you start to run into issues. Not just because the jokes and content are spreading, but the attitudes behind those jokes. And those attitudes (even if they make up just a portion of the users) have a tendency to not be great.

I think a perfect example of this would be what happened on Reddit with the /r/antiwork subreddit. As soon as the community got too large and started spilling into other areas of the site, the cracks started to show. Culminating with the interview by one of the mods (?) on Fox News I believe. All of a sudden a chunk of the users are questioning "Wait, this is who I'm siding with?" and then the only people left are the people who aren't bothered.

Well said, and I think it extends to many communities which are founded on negativity of some sort: eventually people move on, except for those so-filled with negativity, it is all they have.

> Dubs

Not sure if anyone else noticed the item id of this comment does indeed end in 88?

Dubz get!!!

Particularly ironic since it mentions nazis...

Eventually, the ironic becomes unironic. If you're pretending to be an idiot, eventually you'll find yourself surrounded by actual idiots. Or bigots.

  Or is the culture of "getting right to the edge of getting banned but not crossing the line for lulz" and "act in a way nobody knows whether you're actually trolling or not" dead?

Yup, among the sane! If there are any bastions left, we’re working on eradicating them. Honestly kinda baffled someone could type this sentence with the implication that this is a good thing…

>Yup, among the sane! If there are any bastions left, we’re working on eradicating them

The communities of trolls trolling trolls have been replaced by larger communities of nazis training nazis to attack and terrorize. Thank you for eradicating the former, paving way for the latter.

…I really don’t think Nazis are taking over because of a lack of bad faith Internet discussion.

> Where do the young people/trolls hang out and push to the edge of acceptance these days?

Discord. It's all underground. The public internet is hostile to it, everyone has had to built their own spaces.

Instagram reels.

There is a ton of content with dark jokes, black humor, very provocative content and even "nazi" memes and people send it to each other to laugh about it.

Those reels usually have very few likes / comments but A TON of sends. I personally am on multiple group chats where we only send each other those kind of memes.

The thing is, instagram being a huge echo chamber. Before you have no idea those exists, and once you are in you see a ton of those

The echo chamber on Instagram is deep. Even when there are a ton of comments, they’re sorted beginning with the most “relevant” (i.e. worldview affirming). So if you’re viewing a controversial video, you’ll see comments echoing your own beliefs, and others will see the opposite. You’ll both move onto the next video thinking “wow, everyone agrees with me!”

I deleted instagram last year and haven’t reinstalled it. Those reels are so addicting. I’m glad I never installed TikTok because I imagine it’s just as bad. I still suffer from YouTube Shorts but at least the mobile web UI is janky enough to eventually push me out of its trance.

TikTok has the same issue. Two people can see the same video, come to opposite conclusions, and only see comments that agree with them.

TikTok is maybe the last bad echo chamber of the big short video platforms: stitches encourage some sort of debate and expose you to snippets of opposing view points, and the algorithm gives you at least a chance of finding new types of content you also like. But it's only the least bad, it's still very bad. Especial once you factor in your own confirmation bias and the comment algorithm

Instagram is a special level of degeneracy. That is an app made for the masses. I never used tik tok, but youtube shorts gives me actual quality content while instagram feels like its gunning for a mix of reality TV, post 2005 history channel, and animal brain fondling.

Although I will admit that Instagram has their advertising insanely dialed in. The content is gross junk food but the ads I have actually clicked before.

Find a lot of it on discord.

They're still around, they just happen to be on X/Telegram.

Roughly speaking they're in two camps: Groypers and BAP-adjacent Yarvinites. I suppose both are "Nazi" in the sense they are anti-intellectual and anti-egalitarian. Some are paid. Some do it for free.

I don't see much of an equivalent on the left, maybe extreme far left Zizarian types or femcel/misandrists.

No one noticed that you did, in fact, get dubs

There's a very good video series that deconstructs "The Alt-Right playbook", with respect to how they exist between other communities, recruit new members, rhetorical argument, etc.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?app=desktop&list=PLJA_jUddX...

The 4channification of the mainstream is quite sad - it took all the unpleasant sociopathic politics and none of the fun!

> act in a way nobody knows whether you're actually trolling or not

This is basically how I market my blog :)

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